Lincoln Park - Public Art

Public Art

Lincoln Park is known for its statuary. Walking through the park, one sees many of Chicago's great works of art. There is a famous statue of Abraham Lincoln in Lincoln Park by Augustus Saint-Gaudens, the same sculptor who created the Lincoln statue in Grant Park. Replicas of Lincoln Park's "Standing Lincoln" can be found at Lincoln's tomb, Springfield and in Parliament Square, London. The statue is located at Dearborn and North Avenues. It was fully restored in 1989 by the Lincoln Park Conservancy's Adopt-A-Monument Program, and 8,200 s.f. of formal gardens were added in front of the monument.

The only other person who is immortalized by statues in both Grant and Lincoln Parks is Alexander Hamilton, the Lincoln Park statue is sculpted by John Angel. Just as there is an Abraham Lincoln statue in Grant Park, there is a massive memorial to Ulysses S. Grant in Lincoln Park overlooking Cannon Drive. The sculpture was created in 1891 by Louis Rebisso.

The statue of Hans Christian Andersen by Johannes Gelert (1896) on Stockton Drive near Webster Avenue provides a tribute to the Danish storyteller. The Eugene Field Memorial (1922) designed by Edward McCartan remembers the Chicago Daily News columnist and poet who wrote "Little Boy Blue" and "Winken, Blinken, and Nod." William Ordway Partridge's statue of William Shakespeare (1894) provides a third great story-teller in Lincoln Park. This seated Shakespeare provides a lap for children to climb onto. A bust of Sir Georg Solti, the former conductor of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra was also situated in the Lincoln Park Conservatory's formal garden until its relocation to Grant Park in October, 2006. Statues honoring the German poets Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Friedrich Schiller can also be found in Lincoln park. The large Goethe statue is located near Diversey and Stockton. The smaller Schiller statue is located near the western entrance to the zoo.

At Addison Street stands a 40-foot (12 m) totem pole depicting Kwanusila the Thunderbird. Finally, a statue of John Peter Altgeld (1915), the nineteenth-century Illinois Governor who pardoned the Haymarket Square rioters, can be seen just south of Diversey. This statue was created by Gutzon Borglum and unveiled on September 6, 1915. Borglum went on to become the sculptor of the Mount Rushmore Monument.